The quarter past the hour chimed. She released her hand from his, and touched him on the arm with a lingering, caressing touch. He was so big and strong, so gentle too--all hers. And now, just as they had found one another, she was going to lose him. It seemed so unnatural and so cruel. "Jervis," she whispered, and the tears ran down her face, "I think you had better go now. I'd rather we said good-bye here."
He got up at once. "Do you mean to tell your mother?" he asked. And then, as he thought she was hesitating: "I only want to know because, if so, I will tell them at home."
She shook her head. "No," she said brokenly. "I'd rather we said nothing now--if you don't mind."
She lifted up her face to him as a child might have done; and, putting his arm round her, he bent down and kissed her, very simply and gravely. Suddenly, he took her two hands and kissed their soft palms; and then he stooped very low, and lifting the hem of her cotton frock kissed that too.
"Rose?" he cried out suddenly. "Oh, Rose, I do love you so!" And then, before she could speak he had turned and was gone.
Rather more than an hour and a half later, Rose Otway, with bursting heart, but with dry, gleaming eyes--for she had a nervous fear of her mother's affectionate questioning, and she had already endured Anna's well-meant, fussy, though still unspoken sympathy--stood at the spare-room window of the Trellis House. From there she could watch, undisturbed, the signs of departure now going busily on before the big gates of the group of three Georgian houses known as "Robey's."
Piles of luggage, bags, suit-cases, golf sticks, and so on, were being put outside and inside the mid-Victorian fly, which was still patronised by the young gentlemen of "Robey's," in their goings and comings from the station. And then, even before the old cab-horse had started his ambling trot townwards, Mr. and Mrs. Robey, their two little girls, and their three boys not long back from school, all appeared together at the gate.
In their midst stood Jervis Blake, his tall figure towering above them all.
Most young men would have felt, and perhaps a little resented the fact, that the whole party looked slightly ridiculous. Not so this young man. There had never been much of the schoolboy in Jervis Blake. Now he felt very much a man, and he was grateful for the affectionate kindness which made these good people anxious to give him what one of the little girls had called "a grand send-off."